Description:Current issues are now on the Chicago Journals website. Read the latest issue.Recognized as the leading international journal in women’s studies, Signs is at the forefront of new directions in feminist scholarship. The journal publishes pathbreaking articles, review essays, comparative perspectives, and retrospectives of interdisciplinary interest addressing gender, race, culture, class, nation, and sexuality. Special issue and section topics cover a broad range of geopolitical processes, conditions, and effects; cultural and social configurations; and scholarly and theoretical developments.

The "moving wall" represents the time period between the last issue
available in JSTOR and the most recently published issue of a journal.
Moving walls are generally represented in years. In rare instances, a
publisher has elected to have a "zero" moving wall, so their current
issues are available in JSTOR shortly after publication.
Note: In calculating the moving wall, the current year is not counted.
For example, if the current year is 2008 and a journal has a 5 year
moving wall, articles from the year 2002 are available.

Terms Related to the Moving Wall

Fixed walls: Journals with no new volumes being added to the archive.

Absorbed: Journals that are combined with another title.

Complete: Journals that are no longer published or that have been
combined with another title.

Abstract

AbstractThe case of Lubna Al-Hussein, dubbed “the pants journalist,” who was sentenced to flogging after an arrest by public-order police in Sudan, in July 2009, became one of the most widely reported narratives about the subordination of Muslim women in the world. Her case mobilized human rights advocates, politicians, and diplomats to contest discrimination against Sudanese women and to shame the government of Sudan. In this article, I show that beyond media sensationalism and the logic of saving and shaming that characterizes human rights practices exists a feminist opposition politics concerned with equal citizenship rights and invested in protesting both local and global hegemonies and oppressions. I argue that Lubna’s pants served as a symbolic site for competing visions about morality and freedom. One vision represents a transnational hegemony anchored in a neoliberal moral ethos and in discursive practices of universal humanitarianism and human rights, and the other represents a translocal political order grounded in religiosity and bodily containment. Both visions, however, render women’s struggles visible on exclusionary moral terms. I suggest that Lubna’s transnational visibility be situated in a critical historical moment, a state of vulnerability and moral panic that characterizes the present location of Sudan in the global political map. At this historical juncture, feminist politics lend legitimacy to Sudanese translocal dissent politics and highlight women’s multiple alliances and the competing hegemonies that constrain their political struggle.